Protect Your Mind—And Partner with the Machines
A Three-Part Series about Practical Self-Leadership in Times of Acceleration, AI, and Uncertainty
How do you protect your attention when information never stops?
How do you decide what to trust when deepfakes and disinformation circulate at scale?
How do you stay credible when AI changes work faster than most leadership routines?
Welcome to this series of three blog posts based on my new compact book Lead Yourself in a Crazy World: Practical Self-Leadership for CEOs, Entrepreneurs, and Public Leaders.
I know that as a first-level leader you operate under highly challenging conditions: everything accelerates, attention is fragmented, and the future feels more unpredictable.
Chapter 1: Protect your mind (practices you can start today)
The key move is to treat your attention as a scarce strategic resource—otherwise leadership quietly turns into reacting.
Here are three concrete “excerpts-in-action” from the chapter:
Build a personal attention regime: decide when information enters your mind (email, chats, news, social media) and protect uninterrupted time.
Use a simple trust filter: select 3–5 high-quality sources, ignore recurring rumors, and ask three questions before acting.
Establish micro-rituals for clarity: 5-minute evening journaling, a decision log, and a 30-second pause before responding to triggering messages.
One-week experiment (directly usable):
Fix two email windows per day.
Schedule one 60-minute deep-work block daily with notifications off.
Each evening, write three lines: “What really mattered today?”
Chapter 2: Partner with the machines
AI is already in everyday work, often before leaders have reflected on consequences—and cybercrime is evolving through voice cloning, simulated calls, and personalized fraud.
The book’s core message: you don’t need to become an AI engineer; you need a reflected relationship with AI in your leadership role.
Practical steps from the chapter you can apply this week:
Draft a half-page AI stance: a green zone (active use), yellow zone (careful experimentation), red zone (no use).
Create a minimal “tech cockpit”: 3–5 tools you understand deeply and use consistently (instead of trying everything).
Treat cyber risk as self-leadership: verify unusual financial/strategic instructions via a second independent channel.
The book is available as e-book and print here: https://www.amazon.de/dp/B0G7MBSC8W
In the next post, the focus will be on navigating uncertainty (“polycrisis”) and staying grounded in a polarized and angry world.